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Wired News: 2002's Greatest Vaporware
Quill writes "Wired News has once again compiled a list of last year's greatest (worst?) pieces of vaporware. The winner (I won't spoil the surprise) has been on the list three times now! The nomination process was mentioned a few weeks ago on Slashdot."
They're still not shipping segways.
Amazon claims they're selling, but isn't releasing any numbers.
Wasn't this supposed to have changed every american city by now?
Duke Nukem Forever started out on the Quake II engine. When that became outdated, they rewrote it for the Unreal engine. That was the last I ever heard ANY news on the game.
They're going to have to write it again for the new Unreal engine, and then when they're done with that, they'll have to redo it again for the Doom 3 engine.
It's a vicious cycle. Bets that this game won't see the light of day?
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
It's shipping, people have the new motherboards up and running. See Eyetech's (who are making the boards) announcement at http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/oct252002a.php, or the discussion at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amigaone/. The OS itself isn't out yet, but the boards run Linux PPC just fine.
If you buy a game in a store for $25, the best the developers could hope for is $12.5. This is because the retailer gets half of the game's cost. And them getting as much as $12.50 assumes they published the game themselves, which in the case of Max Payne, they didn't
$25 / 2 = $12.50 (half for retailer, half for publisher)
Of that $12.50 that the retailer doesn't take, it is common for the publisher to take 50%, and divide up the rest among whoever is left. Now, Max Payne was developed by Remedy Entertainment, produced by 3D Realms, and published by GodGames.
So, GodGames got 50% of that $12.50, or $6.25. The remaining $6.25 was divided up between Remedy and 3D Realms. Exactly HOW it was divided up is unknown to me, but let's assume that each got 50%.
Therefore, for every $25 copy of Max Payne sold in a retail store, the developers (Remedy Entertainment) got about $3.12. Now, for a while the game cost $40 or $50, but most publishers pull all sorts of shenanigans so that they can stiff the developer out of their share of the money. Even if the publisher is as honest as a Boy Scout, that's still not a lot of money.
If Remedy was smart, they demanded royalties from the movie rights, console and Macintosh port royalties, etc., but hey, who knows, not everybody has good business sense (and some have downright horrid business sense).
Nobody licenses an engine, only to rewrite it. Many companies license a game engine and then make tweaks and additions, but none license something just so they can rewrite it.
Also, like with id Software engines, when you license the Unreal engine, you get access to the updates. 3D Realms may decide not to use them, but they have access to them.
And before you say anything else stupid, the Unreal engine isn't obsolete. Unreal Tournament used it (there is NO Unreal Tournament engine; it's just a much later build of the Unreal engine than the version that shipped with the game Unreal), Unreal Tournament 2003 used it too IIRC.
You see, instead of writing a new engine from scratch for every game, Epic built a solid foundation (the Unreal engine) which they could easily update to include the latest graphic technology. All they do is keep updating the same engine, adding stuff to take advantage of newer graphics cards and faster CPUs.